Organizing Your Brainstorming

Your brainstorming looks like a messy spider web with little word "flies" all caught up in it. You didn't know there was so much information floating around in your head about this topic. But there it is, down on paper. Now what do you do with it?

Before you can begin to write, you must organize your brainstorming. You need to develop an outline. There are several ways to do this. All of them involve organizing your information into main ideas, details, and examples.

You are probably familiar with a traditional outline. These use Roman numerals, capital letters, Arabic numbers, and lower-case letters. A formal outline about the water cycle might look like this:

Water Cycle

I. Accumulation

A. Water collects on surface

1. ponds

2. lakes

3. rivers

II. Evaporation

A. Water changes state